Abstract
In the years since the first nationality debates of the 1980s, the republican philosophy of intégration in France has gone from strength to strength. With the right sweeping to power in the 1993 elections — and the sheer exhaustion of the left after a decade of socialist disappointments — one might have expected the focus of policies to shift. In fact, if anything, the right’s victory enabled the philosophical triumph of the 1980s to concretise and establish itself politically as legislation and policy; a process cemented by the passing of the new Code de la Nationalité and accompanying immigration restrictions, that completed the logic of the consensus soldered under the leadership of the left at the end of the previous decade.
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Notes
Régis Debray, Que vive la République (Paris, 1989).
See, respectively, Alain Minc, La grande illusion (Paris: Grasset, 1989) and
Michel Albert, Capitalisme contre capitalisme (Paris: Seuil, 1993).
Concerns prefigured scientifically in the main conclusions of Gilles Kepel, Les banlieues de l’Islam (Paris: Seuil, 1987) pp. 379–84. For a near hysterical rundown of the threats to la République from Islam in France — typical of the French media in recent years — see the dossier ‘Immigrations: Les cinq tabous’ in L’Express (8 Nov. 1991). The five taboos are cast on special language and culture classes; national service in foreign countries; female circumcision; polygamy; and tolerating fundamentalism.
David Blatt, ‘Towards a multicultural political model in France? The limits of immigrant collective action 1968–1994’, Nationalism andEthnic Politics, vol. 1, no. 2 (1995);
Miriam Feldblum, Reconstructing Citizenship: The Politics of Citizenship and Immigration in Contemporary France (Aldershot: Avebury, 1997).
For example, Jack Lang, ‘L’insulte fake à la France’, in Le Nouvel Observateur (6–12 May 1993).
Le Monde (16 Jun 1993); see also Philippe Seguin, ‘La République et l’exception française’. Philosophie politique, no. 4, pp. 45–62 (1993).
Reuben Ford, ‘Current and future migration flows’, in Sarah Spencer (ed.), Strangers and Citizens. A Positive Approach to Migrants and Refugees (London: IPPR/River Oram Press, 1994).
France historically has been susceptible to this kind of reification of philosophical ideals. See the anthropologist Paul Rabinow’s French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), which as he describes as a ‘fieldwork in philosophy’ inspired by Foucault and Bourdieu.
Numerous French writers have reflected on the linguistic roots of these binary oppositions that permeate French political life. See Emile Benveniste, Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-européenes (Paris, 1969, 2 vols) vol. I, pp. 355–62, on xenos and the foreigner; Emmanuel Lévinas (ed. Sean Hand) The Lévinas Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989); recent work by Abdelmalek Sayad, L’immigration ou les paradoxes de l’altérité (Paris: De Boeck, 1991); and Tzvetan Todorov, Nous et les autres: la réflexion française sur la diversité humaine (Paris: Seuil, 1989). Virginie Guiraudon offers a reconstruction of the binary opposition of étrangers and citoyens in terms of the revolutionary tradition, in ‘Atavisms and new challenges: (re) naming the enemy in contemporary French discourse’, History of European Ideas, vol. 19, no. 1–3 (1994).
For graphic examples, see Nouvel Observateur regulars Jean Daniel and Bernard H. Lévy moralising on Islamic veils one week, for example, ‘Les femmes et l’Islam’ (22–8 Sep 1994), and on Bosnia the next. Or the succession of bestselling intellectual polemics on the subject: Alain Finkielkraut, La défaite de la pensée (Paris: Gallimard, 1987);
Alain Minc, Le nouveau moyen age (Paris: Gallimard, 1993);
Guy Sorman, En attendant les barbares (Paris: Fayard, 1992). Many of these paradoxes are discussed by Sami Naïr, Le regard des vainqueurs: les enjeux français de l’immigration (Paris: Grasset, 1992).
See Simone Bonnafous, L’immigration prise aux mots: les immigrés dans la presse au tournant des années80 (Paris: Kimé, 1991).
See Bernd Baumgartl and Adrian Favell (eds), New Xenophobia in Europe (The Hague: Kluwers, 1995), especially the concluding overview, for a comparative survey of the political capital made from these developments. See also the post-election analysis by Pascal Perrineau, Le Monde (25 Apr 1995).
The criticism of ‘total citizenship’ comes from Ralf Dahrendorf, ‘The changing quality of citizenship’, in Bart van Steenbergen (ed.), The Condition of Citizenship (London: Sage, 1994). See also the Belgian critique of the French surenchère of the public sphere in Albert Bastenier and Felice Dassetto, Immigration et espace public: la controverse de l’intégration (Paris: L’Harmattan: 1993); and Paul Yonnet, Voyage au centre de la malaise française: de l’anti-racisme à la destruction du roman national (Paris: Gallimard, 1993).
Jeremy Waldron, Liberal Rights (Cambridge University Press, 1993);
Luiji Ferrajoli, ‘Dai diritti del cittadino ai diritti della persona’, in Danilo Zolo (ed.), La cittadinanza: appartenenza, identità, diritti (Rome: Editore Laterza, 1994).
François Furet in Furet et al., La Répttblique du centre (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1989);
Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, Des droits de l’homme à l’idée républicaine (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1985).
Although the problem is particularly marked in France, this is a general problem for nation-states in the face of new migrations: see Tomas Hammar, Democracy and the Nation State: Aliens, Denizens and Citizens in a World of International Migration (Aldershot: Avebury, 1990);
Yasemin Soysal, Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe (University of Chicago Press, 1994).
See, in particular, Françoise Lorcerie’s brilliant account: ‘Les sciences sociales au service de l’identité nationale. Le débat sur l’intégration en France au debut des années’, in Dénis Constant-Martin (ed.), Carles d’identité: Comment on dit ‘nous’ en politiques (Paris: Presses de la fondation nationale des sciences politiques, 1994) which discusses in particular the crucial roles played by Dominique Schnapper, Pierre-Andre Taguieff, Gérard Noiriel and Claude Nicolet. See also Danièle Lochak, ‘Usages et mésusages d’une notion polémique: la référence à l’identité nationale dans le débat sur la réforme du code de la nationalité 1985–1993’, in Jacques Chevallier et al., L’identité politique (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1994).
Proponents of the ideas of ‘nouvelle citoyenneté’ included: Jean Leca, ‘Questions sur la citoyenneté’, Projet, no. 173–4, (1983).
Catherine Wihtol de Wenden (ed.), La citoyenneté et les changements de structures sociales et nationales de la population française (Paris: Fondation Diderot, 1988); Said Bouamama, Vers une nouvelle citoyenneté: crise de la pensée laïque; and Said Bouamama, Albano Cordeiro and Michel Roux, La citoyenneté dans tous ses états (Paris: CIEMI/L’Harmattan, 1992). Other non-French writers to discuss these possibilities are Rainer Bauböck, Transnational Citizenship: Membership and Rights in International Migration (Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1994); and Ulrich Preuß’s large-scale project on ‘Concepts, foundations and limits of European citizenship’ at the University of Bremen.
Rogers Brubaker’s account, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), appears however to follow the rather jaundiced French perspective on German politics, that is not very sensitive to the positive developments and quite substantial shifts that have taken place in Germany concerning immigration and naturalisation in the late 1980s and early 1990s. See Kay Heilbronner’s retort, ‘Citizenship and Nationhood in Germany’, in Brubaker (ed.), Immigration and the Politics of Citizenship in Western Europe (New York: University Press of America, 1989).
See also Laura Murray, ‘Einwanderungsland Bundesrepublik Deutschland? Explaining the evolving positions of German political parties on citizenship policy’, German Politics and Society, no. 33 (1994);
Christian Joppke, ‘Towards a new sociology of the state: on Rogers Brubaker’s Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany’,European Archives of Sociology, no. 36 (1995); and a more critical German perspective in René Del Fabbro, ‘A victory of the street’, in Baumgartl and Favell (eds), op. cit.
Jürgen Habermas, ‘Citizenship and national identity: Some reflections on the future of Europe’, Praxis International, vol. 12, no. 1 (1992).
ibid. This problem is also a key issue in Jean Leca’s writing on France, see ‘Individulisme et citoyenneté’, in Pierre Birnbaum and Jean Leca (eds), Sur l’individualisme: théories et methodes (Paris: Presses de la fondation nationale de la Science politique, 1986)
Jean Leca, ‘Une capacité défaillante d’intégration’, Esprit (Jun, 1985).
See Danièle Lochak, ‘Etrangers et citoyens au regard du droit’, in Catherine Wihtol de Wenden (ed.), op. cit.; and ‘La citoyenneté: un concept juridique flou’, in Dominique Colas (ed.), Citoyenneté et nationalité: perspectives en France et en Québec (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1991); Smain Laacher (ed.) Questions de nationalité: histoires et enjeux d’un code (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1987).
See the latest interventions by Pierre-André Taguieff, La République menacée (Paris: Textuels, 1996); and
Christian Jelen, La France éclatée (Paris, 1996).
See Robert-Jean Leclerq, ‘Natures des revendications et des enjeux culturels portés par les minorités actives issues de l’immigration maghrébine en France pour la période 1978–1987’, in Bernard Lorreyte (ed.), Les politiques d’intégration des Jeunes issue de l’immigration (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1989).
The best overall account of the affaire in French is Françoise Gaspard and Farhad Khosrokhavar, Le foulard et al République (Paris: La découverte, 1995).
See Will Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community and Culture (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989); and
Stephen Mulhall and Adam Swift, Liberals and Communitarians (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996, 2nd edn) for the standard lines of opposition. Then turn to rather more sceptical accounts of the debate given by the leading ‘communitarians’, Charles Taylor, ‘Cross-purposes: the liberal—communitarian debate’, in Nancy Rosenblum (ed.) Liberalism and the Moral Life (Combridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989); and Michael Walzer, ‘The communitarian critique of liberalism’, Political Theory (Feb. 1990).
A central question at the heart of the recent feminist quarrel over l’affaire du foulard between Anna Elisabetta Galleotti, ‘Citizenship and equality: the place for toleration’, Political Theory, vol. 21, no. 4 (1993); and
Norma Claire Moruzzi, ‘A problem with headscarves: contemporary complexities of political and social identities’, Political Theory, vol. 22, no. 4 (1994).
Kofi Yamgnane, Droits, devoirs et crocodiles (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1992).
See the discussions of similar dilemmas in the USA with Amish or native groups in Jeff Spinner, The Boundaries of Citizenship: Race, Ethnicity and Nationality in the Liberal State (Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).
This reflects the inspiration of post-structuralist Lacanian psychoanalysis, as well as the ever-present ideas of Jacques Derrida translated into American. See for example, Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton University Press, 1992);
Catherine MacKinnon, Only Words (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), for some archetypal feminist arguments of this kind.
See a similar type of reasoning in Susan Mendus’s very enlightening article on the Rushdie Affair, ‘The tigers of wrath and the horses of instruction’, in Bhikhu Parekh et al., Free Speech: The Report of a Seminar (London: CRE, 1990).
Gilles Kepel, A l’ouest d’Allah (Paris: Seuil, 1994).
See Françoise Lorcerie, ‘L’université du citoyen à Marseilles’, Annales de la recherche urbaine no. 68–9, the report of an experiment with active citizenship being run in parts of the city; Marie Poinsot, ‘The competition for political legitimacy at local and national levels among North Africans in France’, New Community, vol. 20, no. 1 (1993) and L’intégration politique des jeunes issus de l’immigration: du débat des idés aux actions collectives dansl’agglomeration lilloise (Paris: IEP thése du doctorat, 1994); J-M Belorguy, ‘Evaluer les politiques de la ville’, Territoires, no. 345–6 (Feb–Mar 1994); and various essays in Françoise Lorcerie (ed.), Publiques politiques et minorités: les groupes minoritaires comme objets et partenaires de l’action publique (Paris: LGDJ, 1997).
An up-to-date collection is Robert Lawson et al. (eds), Poverty, Inequality and the Crisis of Social Policy (New York: Russell Sage, 1994).
See the report by the L’Institut banlieuescopie, reported in Le Monde (2 Mar 1995) on poverty and les cités; Sophie Body-Gendrot, Ville et violence: l’irruption de nouveaux acteurs (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1993);
Serge Paugram, La société française et ses pauvres (Paris: Presses universitaires de françaises, 1993).
See also François Dubet and Didier Lapeyronnie, Les quartiers d’exil (Paris: Seuil, 1992);
Adil Jazouli, Les années banlieues (Paris: Seuil, 1992).
See again Gilles Kepel, A la ouest d’Allah, reading these facts in a somewhat alarmist republican light. See also Jocelyn Césari, Etre Musulman en France: associations, militants et mosquées (Paris: Karthala, 1994) for an account rather less hostile to the problems faced by Muslim groups in France.
Michel Wieviorka, L’espace du racisme (Paris: Seuil, 1991) and the volume edited by him, Une société fragmentée? Le multiculturalisme en débat (Paris: La déouverte, 1996); Pierre Bourdieu (ed.), La misére du monde (Paris: Seuil, 1993).
Philippe Genestier, ‘Pour une intégration communautaire?’, Esprit (Feb. 1991).
Mike Davis, City of Quartz (New York: Vintage, 1990), and Beyond Blade Runner. Urban Control: The Ecology of Fear (Westfield, NJ: Open Magazine Pamphlet no. 23); Mickey Kaus, The End of Equality (New York: Basic Books, 1992); William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass and Public Policy (Chicago University Press, 1987); Loïc Wacquant and William Julius Wilson, ‘Poverty, joblessness and the social transformation of the inner city’, in Phoebe Cottingham and David Ellwood (eds), Welfare Policy for the 1990s (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991); Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993); Andrew Hacker, Two Nations: Separate, Unequal, Hostile (New York: Basic Books, 1992).
Loïc Wacquant, ‘Banlieues français et ghetto noir américain: de l’amalgame à la comparaison’, French Politics and Society, vol. 10, no. 4 (1992);
Sophie Body-Gendrot and Martin Schain, ‘National and local politics and the development of immigration policy in the United States and France: a comparative analysis’, in Donald Horowitz and Gerard Noiriel (eds), Immigrants in Two Democracies: French and American Experiences (New York University Press, 1992).
Essentially the line taken by William Julius Wilson in his work, following The Declining Significance of Race (Chicago University Press, 1980) in order to put together a ‘color-blind’ policy platform on poverty and race for the Clinton campaign in 1992: see ‘Race neutral politics and the Democratic coalition’, American Prospect, no. 1 (Spring 1990).
See Pierre Sadran, Le systéme administratif français (Paris: Montechristian, 1992); and
Yves Mény, La corruption de la République (Paris: Fayard, 1992) on the general problem of which it is part.
Denis Lacorne, L’invention de la République: le modéle Américain (Paris: Hachette, 1991). No better analysis of the French fascination with the USA has been written than that by Jean Baudrillard, L’Amérique (Paris: Grasset, 1986), in which the dream-like picture he makes of America constantly hovers between equal parts unreal fin de millenia fantasy and nightmare.
See Troy Duster, Backdoor to Eugenics (London: Routledge, 1990). One only need think of the dubious backers for Richard Hernstein and Charles Murray’s controversial and massively publicised book, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York: Free Press, 1994).
Quoted in Dominique Schnapper, La France de l’integration (Paris: Gallimard, 1991).
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© 1998 Adrian Favell
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Favell, A. (1998). France into the 1990s: Following the Integration Line jusqu’au bout. In: Philosophies of Integration. Migration, Minorities and Citizenship. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-333-99267-8_5
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